g-9 H^ 



ADVANCE COPY 



International Concili 



SPECIAL BULLETIN 




THE GREAT WAR AND ITS LESSONS 



D 525 
.B788 
1914a 
Copy 1 




By 
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 

President, Columbia University 

OCTOBER, 1914 



American Association for International Conciliation' 

Sub-Station 84 (407 West 1 17th Street) 

New York City 







'71 






ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT BUTLER 

AT THE 

OPENING EXERCISES OF THE ACADEMIC YEAR 
OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

SEPTEMBER 23. 1914 

fflgSHjO each member of the University new or old, to the 
ff®®l ^cAo/arej docentes and to the Scholares discentes, I 
1"*'^' give a hearty welcome on this opening day of the i6ist 
year of Columbia's long and honorable life. 

Our usual interests however great, our usual problems how- 
ever pressing, all seem petty and insignificant in view of what 
has befallen the world while we were seeking rest and re- 
freshment in the summer holiday. The murky clouds of cruel, 
relentless war, lit by the Hghtning flash of great guns and 
made more terrible by the thunderous booming of cannon, 
hang over the European countries that we know and love 
so well. The great scholars that we would have so gladly 
welcomed here, have not come to us. They are killing and 
being killed across the sea. Friends and colleagues whom 
we honor are filled with hate toward each other, and toward 
each other's countrymen. The words that oftenest come to 
our lips, the ideals that we cherish and pursue, the progress 
that we fancied we were making, seem not to exist. Man- 
kind is back in the primeval forest, with the elemental brute 
passions finding a truly fiendish expression. The only apparent 
use of science is to enable men to kill other men more quickly 
and in greater numbers. The only apparent service of phil- 
osophy is to make the worse appear the better reason. The 
only apparent evidence of the existence of religion is the fact 
that divergent and impious appeals to a palpably pagan God, 
have led him, in perplexed distress, to turn over the affairs 
of Europe to an active and singularly accomplished devil. 

What are we to think? Is science a sham? Is philosophy 
a pretence? Is religion a mere rumor? Is the great interna- 
national structure of friendship, good-will and scholarly co- 
operation upon which this University and many of its mem- 

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bers have worked so long, so faithfully, and apparently with 
so much success, only an illusion? Are the long and devoted 
labors of scholars and of statesmen to enthrone Justice in the 
place of Brute Force in the world, all without effect? Are 
Lowell's lines true — 

Right forever on the scaffold, 
Wrong forever on the throne ? 

The answer is No ; a thousand times, No ! 

Despite all appearances, even in this wicked and causeless 
war which is decimating the flower of European manhood; 
multiplying by the million the widows, the orphans, the suffer- 
ing and distressed; wrecking the commercial and industrial 
progress of a century; impoverishing alike the belligerents 
and the neutrals; closing the exchanges from New York to 
Buenos Aires ; ruining the cotton planter of the South as well 
as the copper miner of the far West; recruiting an army of 
unemployed that will far outnumber even the countless hosts 
of the fighting legions ; loosing in the frenzied combatants the 
primitive instincts for savagery and lust — even here there is 
to be found something on which this University may con- 
tinue to build the temple of wisdom, of justice and of true 
civilization to which its hand was laid when George II was 
king, when Louis XV still reigned in France, and when Fred- 
erick the Great was at the height of his fame in Prussia. 

We are a neutral nation, and the President has rightly en- 
joined us all to observe neutrality in speech and in deed. But 
neutrality is not indifference: it is not the neutrality of the 
casual passer-by who views with amused carelessness a fight 
between two street rowdies; it is the neutrality of the just 
judge who aims, without passion and without prejudice, to 
render judgment on the proved facts. We cannot if we would 
refrain from passing judgment upon the conduct of men 
whether singly or in nations, and we should not attempt to do 
so. 

In the first place, the moral judgment of the American peo- 
ple as to this war and as to the several steps in the declara- 
tion and conduct of it, is clear, calm, and practically unanimous. 
There is no beating of drums and blowing of bugles, but rather 
a sad pain and grief that our kin across the sea, owing what- 
ever allegiance and speaking whatever tongue, are engaged in 

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public murder and destruction on the most stupendous scale 
recorded in history. This of itself proves that the education 
of public opinion has proceeded far, and, whatever the war- 
traders and militarists may say, that the heart of the American 
people is sound and its head well-informed. The attitude of 
the American press is worthy of the highest praise; in some 
notable instances the very high-water mark of dignity and of 
power has been reached. When the war-clouds have lifted, 
and all the facts are known everywhere, I believe that the 
moral judgment of the American people as to this war will 
prove to be that of the sober-minded and fair-minded men in 
every country of Europe. 

Next, it must not be forgotten that this war was made by 
kings and by cabinets: it was not decreed by peoples. I can 
testify that the statement that kings and cabinets were forced 
into the war by public sentiment, is absolutely untrue, so far 
at least as several of the belligerent nations are concerned. 
Certainly in not more than two cases were the chosen repre- 
sentatives of the people consulted at all. A tiny minority in 
each of several countries may have desired war, but the mili- 
tarist spirit was singularly lacking among the masses of the 
population. People generally have simply accepted with grim 
resignation and reluctant enthusiasm the conflict which in each 
case they are taught to believe has been forced on them by 
another's aggression. 

The most significant statement that I heard in Europe was 
made to me on the third day of August last by a German rail- 
way servant, a grizzled veteran of the Franco-Prussian war. 
In reply to my question as to whether he would have to go 
to the front, the old man said: "No; I am too old. I am 
seventy-two. But my four boys went yesterday, God help 
them ! and I hate to have them go." "For, Sir," he added in 
a lowered voice, "this is not a people's war ; it is a kings' war, 
and when it is over there may not be so many kings." 

Again, a final end has now been put to the contention, always 
stupid and often insincere, that huge armaments are an in- 
surance against war and an aid in maintaining peace. This 
argument was invented by the war-traders who had munitions 
of war to sell, and was nothing more than an advertisement 
for their business. Sundry politicians, many newspapers, and 
not a few good people who are proud to have their thinking 
done for them, accepted this advertisement as a profound politi- 



cal truth. Its falsity is now plain to every one. Guns and 
bullets and armor are not made to take the place of postage 
stamps and books and laboratories and other instruments of 
civilization and of peace; they are made to kill people. Since 
war is an affair of governments and of armies, one result of the 
present war should be to make the manufacture and sale of 
munitions of war, a government monopoly hereafter. This is 
a case where invasion of the field of liberty by government 
would do good, not harm. Then, too, the export of munitions 
of war from one country to another should be absolutely for- 
bidden. When that happens, the taxpayer will be able to see 
just how his money is spent, and to check the expenditure, 
and the powerful war-trader with his lines of influence in 
every parliament house and in every chancellery will be elimi- 
nated. 

It seems pretty clear that when the present huge supplies 
of guns and ammunition are used up in the contest now going 
on, no civilized people will ever again permit its government 
to enter into a competitive armament race. The time may 
not be so very far distant when to be the first moral power in 
the world will be a considerably greater distinction than to 
be the first military power or even the second naval power, 
which latter goal is so constantly and so subtly urged on the 
people of the United States. How any one, not fit subject 
for a mad-house, can find in the awful events now happening 
in Europe, a reason for increasing the military and naval estab- 
lishments and expenditures of the United States, is to me 
wholly inconceivable. 

Another great gain is to be found in the fact that no one 
is willing to be responsible for this war. Every combatant 
alleges that he is on the defensive, and summons his fellow 
countrymen who are scientists and philosophers to find some 
way to prove it. The old claim that war was a part of the 
moral order, a God-given instrument for the spreading of en- 
lightenment, and the only real training-school for the manly 
virtues, is just now in a state of eclipse. Each one of the sev- 
eral belligerent nations insists that it — and its government — 
are devoted friends of peace, and that it is at war only be- 
cause war was forced upon it by the acts of some one else. 
As to who that some one else is, it has not yet been possible 
to get a unanimous agreement. What we do know is that no 
one steps forward to claim credit for the war or to ask a vote 

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of thanks or a decoration for having forced it upon Europe 
and upon the world. Everybody concerned is ashamed of it 
and apologetic for it. 

It may well be, moreover, that the desperately practical and 
direct education which this war is affording will hasten very 
much the coming of the day when the close economic and in- 
tellectual interdependence of the nations will assert itself more 
emphatically and more successfully against national chauvinism 
and the preposterous tyranny of the militarists. The armed 
peace which preceded this war, and led directly to it, was in 
some respects worse than war itself; for it had many of the 
evils of war without war's educational advantages. We are 
not likely to return again to that form of wickedness and folly, 
unless perchance the continent of Europe is able to produce 
another generation of public men as self-centered and of as 
narrow a vision as those who have generally been in control 
of public policy there for forty years past. The whole card- 
house of alliances and ententes, together with the balance of 
power theory, has come tumbling heavily to the ground. 
Something far different and much more rational will arise in 
its stead. In the Europe of tomorrow there will be no place 
for secret treaties and understandings, for huge systems of 
armed camps and limitless navies, for sleepless international 
enmity and treachery, for carefully stimulated race and re- 
ligious hatred or for wars made on the sole responsibility of 
monarchs and of ministers. Moral, social and political progress 
will refuse longer to pay the crushing tolls which a conven- 
tional diplomacy and an unenlightened statesmanship have de- 
manded of them. It is not the Slav or the Teuton, the Latin 
or the Briton, the Oriental or the American, who is the enemy 
of civilization and of culture. Militarism, there is the enemy ! 

The first notable victim of the Great War was the eloquent 
and accomplished French parliamentarian, M. Jaures. He was 
murdered by a war-crazed fanatic. In the course of a long 
and intimate conversation with M. Jaures shortly before his 
tragic death, he dwelt much on the part that America could 
play in binding the nations of Europe together. He spoke of 
the success of the policies that had been worked out here to 
make the United States and Germany and the United States 
and France better known to each other, and he thought that 
through the agency of the United States it might eventually 
be practicable to draw Germany and France together in real 



trust and friendship. As we parted his last words to me were : 
"Do not leave off trying. No matter what the difficulties are, 
do not leave off trying." To-day the words of this great 
socialist leader of men, seem like a voice from beyond the 
grave. They are true. We must not leave off trying. When 
exhaustion, physical and economic, brings this war to an end, 
as I believe it will at no distant day, the task of America and 
Americans will be heavy and responsible. It will be for us 
to bind up the war's wounds, to soften the war's animosities, 
and to lead the way in the colossal work of reconstruction that 
must follow. Then if our heads are clear, our hearts strong, 
and our aims unselfish — and if our nation continues to show 
that it means always to keep its own plighted word — ^we may 
gain new honor and imperishable fame for our country. We 
may yet live to see our great policies of peace, of freedom 
from entangling alliances, of a world concert instead of a con- 
tinental balance of power, of an international judiciary and 
an international police, of international co-operation instead of 
international suspicion, generally assented to, and, as a result, 
the world's resources set free to improve the lot of peoples, 
to advance science and scholarship, and to raise humanity to 
a level yet unheard of. Here lies the path of national glory 
for us, and here is the call to action in the near future. 

It is often darkest just before the dawn, and the hope of 
mankind may lie in a direction other than that Europe to- 
ward which we are now looking so anxiously. Arthur Hugh 
Clough's noble verses are an inspiration to us at this hour : 

Say not the struggle nought availeth. 
The labor and the wounds are vain, 

The enemy faints not, nor faileth. 

And as things have been, they remain. 

* * :{{ Hi * * 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 

Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 

Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 

And not by eastern windows only, 

When daylight comes, comes in the light, 

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly. 
But westward, look, the land is bright. 

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